Black Hat Techniques Series: Is Cloaking Tempting You?

Because my last post was successful among LSA blog readers, I thought it’s a good idea to continue exploring this topic.

One of the most popular black hat search engine optimization technique is called cloaking.  In a few words, cloaking means that before displaying its content, a web site checks if the visitor is a human or a search engine spider. For each one of them, the site has prepared a different method for displaying content. In other words, after the site has determined that it is crawled by a web spider, it displays a totally different content than if it were accessed by an internet surfer.

This method helps web site with poor content to get a better ranking in the search results. Most web site that use this black hats SEO technique to be classified as content rich sites by the search engines are stuffed with keywords that might not have any relevance with the actual content displayed for the human visitors. In this case, search engines might be fooled to display irrelevant sites that can have nothing in common with the search query.  For example, kids might search for information about their favorite stars and end up on a pornography site. And that’s bad, isn’t it? That’s why search engines condemn this deceiving SEO technique. Like all the other search engines, Google insists that web site should treat both humans and web spiders the same.

Is IP Delivery a Black Hat SEO Technique?

IP delivery is not the same thing as cloaking. While cloaking is used intentionally to get a better ranking, IP delivery displays the same content for all types of visitors.

IP delivery is usually used by international sites and not by local businesses. Sometimes IP delivery is used for changing the content’s language for users in different countries. For example, some social networks display content in the language from the IP’s address origin.

Cloaking is a deceitful technique and, when discovered, it is harshly punished by search engines. In case you are thinking to use it, I suggest you to think again. Although it brings some extra traffic to your site, one day you can realize that the site has a very low ranking or, even worse, it was banned and should be resubmitted for approval. Don’t waste the progress your site has made to this very day; black hat search engine optimization techniques reap only short term benefits.